MoM

by Miriam Weiser

Mom. Master Of Many.

Many responsibilities, that is.

Have you ever seen the extensive list of jobs that pertain to a mother? It’s insane. It is unbelievable that so many of us do it without too much complaint. So many of us do it with grace and a smile. Many of us are slowly going crazy, but then there are the days when we prove to ourselves that it is all worth it.

Those days come by quite often. They do come. And eventually you look back and realize that it was fun. It was hectic, chaotic, weird, ridiculous, and silly. It was sad and happy, amusing, and exhausting. But a lot of it was fun.

What other job, for example, has you sitting on the floor giggling at the fact that the baby just spit up all over you? What other job has you drained beyond comprehension, yet you still go to check on things in the middle of the night? What other job has you spending every single dollar on earth and then some just to see another human being smile?

The jobs, the chores, every breath we take is comprised for the sole purpose of taking care of others; namely, our family.

Each to its’ own degree and volume, the daily life of a mom is congruent to a massive corporation run and assisted by many people. This we already know.

This kind of thing has been discussed ad nauseum for many generations. Poems have been written. Songs were composed and sung many times a year. Stories and soliloquies, orations and dramatic monologues have been penned and parallels have been attempted, to little avail or purpose. Yet when it comes down to the basics and the truths of it, moms still don’t give themselves enough credit. But since credit is not what we expect or need, and the job of motherhood has remained as tantamount to mountain climbing on icy terrain with bags of rocks that leak all kinds of unnamed fluids, let me focus on an issue we keep trying and perhaps failing at, depending on who’s protesting.

One of the most important and most oft factors of motherhood is feeding their kin. Feeding your family seems quite simple and straightforward. It isn’t.

You can either feed them all what they like and what they want, what they ask for without considering what they actually need. You do the shopping, the buying, the cooking, baking, and preparing and everyone’s happy. Except not all of them are. Especially not in the long run. Because if you don’t take the time to make it worthwhile, if you feed your family easy fast food too often, if you buy or cook and bake unhealthy foods because that’s what they want, everyone feels the consequences eventually.

On the other hand, if you take the job ultra-seriously, and you search for healthy all the time, and you compromise on taste and texture, the food can be bland and unsatisfactory, creating many unhappy folks.

Let’s consider the fact that different people have different wants and needs, diets, or health issues. You can’t possibly take an entire family made up of children of all ages and stages and adults with various dietetic issues and continuously serve them the same nutrition.

So, say you have a toddler who eats bread and cream cheese and snacks, and you have young school-age kids who need to take snacks to school, where they have bread and pasta and potato kugel served as meals. Then you have teenagers who are starting to worry about their weight. They’re not necessarily worrying about their health. No. They just want to fit in and be as thin as their peers. When those teens stop eating anything wholesome because it has calories, you as a mom start to worry and begin to hunt for options to help them.

You want to help them. Always, you want to help them. And by filling that need to help them, you, in turn, sometimes find yourself running around in abstract and conjectural circles. Your husband, dear wife who always wants to please everyone, needs, no wants, a steak and potatoes dinner, with bread on the side to dip into the gooey gravy.

When registering a mom’s list of roles, of tasks and duties, somehow this challenge doesn’t usually appear on the document. Quite the contrary, we moms are typically the beneficiary in the blame game when it comes to our children’s health and the health of the family as a whole.

Why is it that the first thing they do at every pediatrician’s appointment is place the child on the scale? Is their weight the singular indication of poor health? But as soon as a child is weighed the doctor indubitably turns to the mother and gives unsolicited advice as to how not to feed said child.

The doctor seems to ignore the fact that the child’s weight was not the reason for the visit. But now the mom is placed under pressure, yes pressure, and more guilt, upon leaving the office.

Anyone remember when the doctor’s office used to hand out lollipops for the children who behaved? Well, they didn’t always behave, but they always left with a lollipop.

So, the supermarket is full of myriad colored and shaped fruits, veggies and the shelves are brimming with numerous types of whole wheat fare, crackers and flatbreads that are so much better for your health than plain old bread. You could find shelves upon shelves of low carb cookies and gluten free stuff to satisfy every sweet tooth, except we all know that all this stuff is more caloric than the plain old regular items that we were fed when we were growing up.

Anyway, this was not meant to be an article on food and diets. I simply want the masses to take notice of the most difficult job ever: trying to make everyone happy.

But it doesn’t happen.

For years, I’ve dreamed of having a nutritionist come over to my home and peruse my pantry and fridge. Conversations with them in my mind abounded. Arguments even ensued. Explanations followed. There’s a feeling of desperate desire to try to prove that I am doing my absolute best. Like I have to prove something. Like proving it would set me free. Free of disparaging looks and remarks.

The truth is no one has given me any disparaging looks and remarks. The entire thing was and always has been in my mind. I’ve always projected these thoughts, and then following them with reasoning and justifications about why I was doing what I was doing.

Yet wanting to make everyone happy is a given nature to mothers around the world. The question is: is giving them what they want always the way to make them happy? Or is it knowing the difference between what they want and what they need? Or, perhaps, is this also one of those things that go onto the ‘everything in moderation’ scale?

I think it is.

And for those of you who are lurking in my psyche, we may not be so lucky in the department of weight genes. But you should see our geniuses, our capacity to live and have fun. Don’t be jealous, though. We each have our own endowments. What we do with them is what matters.